Artist, Instructor, using only Free/Libre and Open-Source software since 2009.

Website optimization

Published on 12 september 2018

At the end of August and the start of September, a lot of work has been invested into the optimization of the Pepper&Carrot website. The server of the website had CPU issues during all summer and my host
was starting to complain about the project on a weekly basis.

But
thanks to the big contributions of Jookia
and other fixes preventing hot-linking of resources; the website is now consuming less than 1/4 of what it
was before. The structure is now ready to welcome more visitors! The number of visitors is increasing month after month and optimization like this is vital for
the project. You can read the history of the fix here to see how it was done. This method will probably be interesting for all owners of PluXML blogs with high traffic!

Illustration: a screenshot from the CPU graph.

In the process, I setup http://test.peppercarrot.com : a version of the peppercarrot.com website to test new code. This test area reflects the source code of the Git website repository here. This tool will help to welcome eventual (new?) contributors curious to work on the P&C website.

That's all, thank you very much for all the visit. You are one of over 10,000 daily readers! If something is buggy, or doesn't render well on your device, please, let me know!

I don't have Google Analytics but a tool provided by my host to read the log (Urchin);

To be completely fair, most of the CPU performance gains are from David's hot linking removal for the cat avatars. ;)
My code adds a HTML cache to PluXml which was committed a third in to the graph and can be shown to remove a lot of the spikes. This means that if a popular site like imgur or reddit links to this site it won't go down from all the traffic.